


Away

by AlixanderFD



Series: The Flesh Not Seen [3]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Afterlife, Flash Fiction, Macabre, Memento mori, conceptual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-02
Updated: 2020-03-02
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:14:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22983853
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlixanderFD/pseuds/AlixanderFD
Summary: A gravedigger among graves, disappearing.—‘The wet nighttime air whisked between every opening into the shack.I must keep digging. I cannot sit here, they should come back soon and when they do I must be—’
Series: The Flesh Not Seen [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1651750





	Away

The wet nighttime air whisked between every opening into the shack.

_I must keep digging. I cannot sit here, they should come back soon and when they do I must be—_

From the radio, garbled sounds that had stretched thin over miles and miles filled the room, warbling voices stripped of human cadence or pitch. As if in an attempt to keep tempo with them, light from the torches outside peered in and flittered up the walls.

There weren’t enough blankets in the shack to keep off the relentless cold, but the windows had to remain open as long as possible. The grave digger would only close them just before short turns of sleep, and when she woke, she would open them back up and stick her head through to check that the torches were still burning. She would feed them one by one and survey the horizon as it lay pristine, and then, shovel in hand, she would begin to wade through the fields.

This place was a pulse in stasis. Chilled to a halt, blue in the undertones, bruised purple overhead. It resisted change, matching every effort to mark it and overtaking. It disappeared hard matter beneath the grass. It smothered the radioed garble.

Occasionally, the grave digger would spot a dark patch in the distance where the grass had been depressed, and that was a corpse. Always singular, and usually naked. Hardly ever in a more advanced stage of decay than rigor mortis having seized the face, or the digits. More often, she judged that they had appeared within a few hours of her arrival.

The digger stopped walking upon reaching the edge of one such dark patch. A pair of brown eyes trembled as they sought her face, but the body could not lift its hands to reach for her. But for the shimmering of its wetted cheeks in the torchlight, it lay in paralysis, wearing peace like a vat of tar.

She began to dig.

In frantic waves the corpse battered its panic against her. It begged in vain for her acknowledgement and roiled in the disembodied way that it could, a soul desperate to convince anyone that it had gone too soon. When she buried it, she started with the face; she tossed dirt on the eyes to prevent them from following her as she worked, and then she piled it high until the stars had scattered themselves across the sky and the corpse’s voice could no longer pierce the surface.

_And someday I will have to bury the sun and all the fireflies, the moon crashed down to earth—_

Mercy, how they all howled. They cried like the meadow ended somewhere, not knowing how vehemently it held on to what it ensnared. She feared those voices would bury her beneath their sound, drive the windows closed and drown out the radio. The dead had nothing left but to be tucked away here, but the grave digger had resisted the land’s attempts to bury her. By firelight and vigilance, she could still be free. But only if— _only if_ she kept digging.

The night kept still. Another warm body lay in the grass, transported silently into the darkness and left alone for the digger to find; the way out had passed her by once more. Thrusting her shovel into the earth once again, she hardened herself to the despairing onslaught the corpse rained upon her.

Not all of them lay atop empty plots. Once a dirt patch had flushed teal again and refitted itself into the landscape, it was impossible to know if she had dug there before. The hole she emptied here revealed a shambles in pale yellow that begged as it sensed the air flowing in. Not to leave its grave, or go back to the living. But it begged.

“Please, tell me what this place is,” whispered the face in absolute stillness. “Am I dead?”

_And the shack will bury the mice and me within splinters—_

Time and darkness made them gentle, but only the dirt could keep them quiet. On her hands and knees, the digger pulled her hands across the pile to sweep soil back into the hole and over the remains.

“I had someone,” it said, unbridled by her efforts to cover it. “She was a bright star in the universe, but this hole casts a shadow on every face I knew. I will be alone, now and forever.”

She could go back. Her hands would pack down the soil, and eventually someone would have to find her.

“Don’t leave.” “Don’t forget about me.” “I have to get home.”

A shovel was a voice. A grave, an echo that sustained her call.

The radio sputtered inside the grave digger’s shack, trilling high like an unanswered phone. She wrapped herself tight, but she could not get warm.

They howled.

They howled.

They howled.


End file.
